Pandora To Celebrate 10 Years With Ad Free Listening
Pandora turns 10 years old next week, and a decade is an eternity in digital music. After they launched, co-founder Tim Westergren spent a lot of time out of the office doing roadshows at places like the AARP Convention demoing how to stream music on your computer.
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Pandora turns 10 on September 9th and to celebrate its going ad free for 24 hours.
They're calling it Listener Love Day – a full day of music with no ads from 12:00am ET, Wednesday, September 9 thru 12:00am ET, Thursday, September 10.
Ten years in, Pandora is still losing money and fighting on every front to lower the royalties is pays. That's despite its dominance of the online radio space – almost 80 million listeners tune in each month, logging more than 74 billion listening hours, creating over 8 billion stations and sharing more than 55 billion thumbs over the last decade.
In recent months, Pandora has stepped up efforts to serve artists with analytics, including the purchase of music data provider Next Big Sound, and direct to fan messaging. If you can get past the royalty battles, its important to remember that 200,000 artists are playing to the largest audience in streaming music; and thanks to how Pandora delivers music, fans are discovering new artists on a daily basis.
So who is subsidizing this free day? Presumably that means the artists and rights-holders are not getting a cent for this free period? Without their consent?